


to muzzle a wolf

by wetatmospheres



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Abuse, Brutal Murder, Child Abuse, Codependency, F/M, Hanging, Hopeful Ending, Involuntary Muteness, Organized Crime, Selective Muteness, Stalking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-12 15:19:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17470058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wetatmospheres/pseuds/wetatmospheres
Summary: Nor are she or Levi children despite the eternal adolescence of their room, the liminal anxiety and the strain that comes behind. They have the discipline not to leave claw marks on their cave, yet still she howls - silently, always, but with the same force as wild dogs throwing forelegs upon her ribs.An Ackerman criminal AU, in which Kenny has expectations of the children he raised and the gasps of freedom Levi and Mikasa taste slowly cease to be enough.





	1. hunting

**Author's Note:**

> The stalking and Ackerman criminal family AU that nobody asked for. Inspirations for this include multiple pieces of Winter Soldier/SNK crossover fanart, musings on codependency, the movies The Handmaiden and The Shape of Water, and The Wolf by SIAMÉS. Please leave me a comment and let me know what you think!

The masks - the _muzzles_ , they do not lie to themselves about that fact anymore - are a client’s fault. They are young and stoic, clean-scrubbed at Kenny’s knee; the man comments that they resemble wolf pups learning the hunt. It’s the eyes, he says as he downs bourbon over the high desk, gray and identical, tracking all. And then Levi snarks off later about why they can’t keep a stray kitten that’s poked its way into the house, and Kenny wraps cord about the animal’s throat and squeezes until its head slides off. 

Two days and he comes full circle, kicking into their shared bedroom. Mikasa is old enough to hide her chest yet wise enough not to bother; her shoulder already meets Levi’s as they stand still for their uncle. “Best you wear this,” he says as his large hand smothers her; she wheezes for desperate seconds before realizing the mask has vents. “Or I’ll keep popping you in the fucking mouths and that don’t look good when people come by.”

It is elegant, in a grotesque sort of way. Fits their smaller faces and beeps mostly unnoticed, as if forgetting one’s blinking until the motion is mentioned. They are not twins, not even siblings, but Kenny likes to play up the matching angle as they heel at his sides. Only for sleep does it come off with a shifting of light and a hiss, replaced with a cloth gag that grows damp between the teeth. 

The last words she tries to say to Levi are comfort when Kenny runs out of patience with Kuchel. He had not seen his mother in four years and Mikasa hears gargles under his mask as the woman swings from the courtyard tree. Kuchel’s feet kiss the rosebushes, pointed as a dancer’s, mottled with stilled blood. Kenny lights a cigarette and leaves them to stare, shaking his head - men arrive in bespoke clothing and brush by the tree, brandishing cognac and cards. 

Their uncle does not free them when bedtime draws on, and the inside of her mask is slick with cooling spit in her thick attempts to apologize as if that fixes a goddamn thing. He likewise struggles, arms thin about her middle, and chokes in desperation until the vents wheeze. _Point made_ , Mikasa thinks the next day as the woman is tossed. Her own parents are long settled together with rot, and Kuchel’s dress is bright against their bleached bones. 

They leave, and an hour later Levi’s hands are steady as he tilts a cursing victim’s head back: bleeds her like a pig, ear to ear, until silence falls. And remains, after, for seventeen years. 

Every passing season the roses swell crimson, stroked by Kuchel’s cold skin and if Mikasa puts her mask right up against the stems her heart does something she can almost call peace.

***

The last time Levi hears himself speak is in prepubescence, and as an adult he knows his voice only in wintertime coughs. The masks are reserved for missions and meetings these days: they are no longer pups unable to keep their own silence, and he would hate the way they both conceal half their faces without orders if it were not simple, dull fact. Where Mikasa got the red scarf she favors for that purpose is the one thing he does not know about her. 

He has just crossed his thirties and she is twenty-six, and they still have only ever been given one bed.

The lack of absolute anarchy in the face of this existence is half-fear of a beating and half pragmaticism. No use irritating the person who’s helped you clean piss after nightmares or shook you awake through your concussions - better just to get the goddamn oxyclean for her cycled stains on the sheets and shut up. It makes for a disgusting lack of boundaries to the outside observer, but age brings enough trust that their leashes are longer and enough understanding of the language they share to deal. Sign language, yes, but also simple looks and shifts of body that tell him things. 

Things like how tonight Mikasa wants to be left the fuck alone. 

Nothing seems more wrong with her than usual and so his eyes and hands do not ask why she needs the hours - to cultivate the small windowbox of roses that they pretend Kenny doesn’t know about, to nap maybe in a bed to herself, to meditate, to masturbate in for once shameless peace. All are possibilities and none are his concern, though she watches him as always as he dresses for an assignment. Tells him goodbye in the curve of her shoulder: _don’t be reckless, Levi_. He replies with a _tch_ huffed through white cloth, senses her smile beneath her scarf and heads upstairs. 

Kenny, still three heads taller than him, affixes Levi’s muzzle before he leaves - no one else can, the code unknown. He’s aging but still quick on the draw as ever, breath neutral of alcohol and collar speckled with blood. “Don’t fuck this up, kid,” is a formality, the man’s mind clearly somewhere else. “Uri’s got a shitton riding on it so get good shit, hear me?”

 _Christ._ He’d hoped it was a solo project or at the behest of someone else, but Kenny’s partnership with the Reiss family has run the longest of any without his uncle slitting a throat. He’s seen the man in passing and something about his gaze unnerves him as much as Levi himself unnerves the house guards, who always exchange wary looks when he and Mikasa go by. The creepy mirroring that’s become instinct between them probably doesn’t help; he wonders if Kenny jerked off regularly to The Shining before putting everyone in his family under the ground or his thumb. 

But, as many things, it’s none of his business. He heads onto the roof, soaked down with moonlight, and lets himself have the impractical pleasure of burning too much gas in buildup before throwing himself off the house.

Kenny did not invent his crime ring’s greatest advantage: some sweet-faced couple had over a decade ago, tinkering in their basement and looking for investors in all the wrong places. Kenny killed them personally, their cherubic preteen only escaping through a visit with his grandpa, and trained Mikasa to ensure the kid got no ideas. Levi almost wishes he knew where they were buried just to leave a shitty flower now and then: this is _flight_ , this is every futuristic movie they’d tested their stealth on to watch five minutes of before being kicked for their trouble. 

_Focus, idiot._

Sina Research Facility is the biggest government building in Trost that exactly no one living there wanted built, and fading rumors and time leave it a gray sprawl in the landscape. He knows by now how best to avoid the floodlights, can already spot his target running off the night bus by the sheer noise she makes: laughing at nothing, balancing bagels and apologies to the night guard and stumbling over her own shitty feet. Not Kenny’s mark - not yet - but a person Uri wants watched. 

So Levi goes to watch: knows which old conference room has the loose window, knows the ducts to muscle through and is _not_ bitter about being the only of theirs small enough to use them. He settles high up as he beats her to her lab: she has a routine, which involves bothering three friends and her assistant and pissing on the third floor and getting cream cheese on her glasses. 

He counts eight minutes to the second until the airlocks howl and she emerges: clean by decontamination, maybe, but still the sort of filthy that begs for holding down and scrubbing. The deep kind that took the same scrub brush as the bathtub itself, left little pink lines in reward. 

“Good morning!” she howls to her glass kingdom as though it’s not far past sunset, and Levi lets himself pretend with a soft snort that the nonsense greeting is for him.

_Good morning, Dr. Zoë._

***

The whir of Levi’s cables mask Mikasa’s own, scarf tucked close against her cheeks. She is what normal kids call _sneaking out_ , as though weed and dry humping would get any of them killed. Nor are she or Levi children despite the eternal adolescence of their room, the liminal anxiety and the strain that comes behind. They have the discipline not to leave claw marks on their cave, yet still she howls - silently, always, but with the same force as wild dogs throwing forelegs upon her ribs.

 _Bad idea._ Far worse than anything Levi is up to, although if caught she is not without excuse. Arlert is restless lately and she has stalked him for half her life; it bears investigation. Kenny likes their initiative in small doses and this would be the harmless sort in his eyes, she thinks, because he does not know how badly she’s fucked it up.

Not with Arlert himself. She’d known better. But with his _friend_ , the same one close by at the funeral years ago, the same one she’d let see her in the middle of the road. _Kill him_ , everything had screamed and she hadn’t, half because there was no explanation Kenny would accept and half because she’d wanted to exist to somebody outside that house so badly she could kill herself for wanting.

And he’d been kind, a shuffling spot in a snowstorm her bulky gear did not allow her to dress for. His coat was old - the best afforded after one grandfather’s death and one father’s abandonment - and his scarf likewise, but he’d marched right up to her and wreathed it about her frozen neck.

Levi wants to ask, she knows. Levi wants to ask so badly it’s scraping at his skull but he hasn’t and she’s almost grateful: he’d have surely restored good sense with harsh fingers and flashing eyes, and she needs her shit together before it gets her killed.

But not yet. 

Not when she can land on their roof in a whir of cable and carefully drop to the tiny balcony off the kitchen. Eren cooks - Eren does _everything _between them, it seems, shoos Arlert away to read graduate textbooks and makes himself busy. It clearly pleases him to be useful, though, and Mikasa imagines what the sauce he’s making from scratch might smell like and feels drool streak her teeth.__

__His hair is falling from its bun and he looks tired, a bandage wrapped around his toned bicep. Not as nice as hers or Levi’s, but the comparison is unfair: not everyone trains twelve hours a day. He works with his hands, though: she’d caught him twice by chance that year at the apex of her arcs, shuffling late from some construction site or other with his headphones on his ears._ _

__Arlert is speaking, teasing, poking his face in the pots right up against Eren’s side. She rests her ear to the glass and catches the rumble of Eren’s laughter, his body bent over his friend’s in playful manhandling and her own slacking in the night air. _Research_ , she repeats the lie to herself, feels the tremble of a hum in her disused throat - something effervescent, something contained in the circle of her knees._ _

__They eat. Mikasa breathes the ghosts of their joy and wonders whether Levi has ever played so much pretend._ _


	2. flanking

Eren never did like school, and saying fuck it and not going after his high school diploma is not something most people get the luxury of doing. He tries to be grateful for that, and doing shit like getting to wake Armin up in increasingly dickish ways helps. What doesn’t is that the blonde is so used to Eren tossing him about that being bodily lifted doesn’t rouse him - or being shaken, or patted, or splashed with water, or anything but the full blast cold shower pointed directly at his face.

Eren’s always forgiven by breakfast, though. No one can say no to his waffles.

“What are you doing today?” he’s asked as he battles their ancient coffee machine, kept solely for sentiment of old Mr. Arlert. The thing’s a piece of shit. 

“High rise,” he replies, feels Armin grimace. While it’s nice to be asked about his string of odd jobs as though crawling over construction sites is on the same level as his friend’s aerospace engineering, the blonde _worries_ and it makes Eren picture falling stories to his death far more than he cares to. 

“I know there are safety measures and that you have a lot of experience by now, Eren, but please be careful, okay? I’m not nagging you and you know I’m really proud of everything you’re doing and that we need to make rent but I really wish you’d work stuff closer to the ground - ”

On he goes. Eren can mouth the entire speech - and _does,_ and earns himself a glare when Armin sees him. “Go to class,” he tells him lazily, packing last night’s pasta into two lunches worth of Tupperware. “I won’t go splat on the sidewalk, just for you.”

“I mean it,” the blonde bemoans, his theatrics half-ruined by the syrup on his cheek. “I’m too young to be a widow.”

A joke, made as though they aren’t the only thing each other has since Grisha fucked off and as though they don’t take turns once every few years putting toes in that pool. “You won’t be,” he soothes, nudges a paper bag against Armin’s elbow. “Go, or everyone good will pick each other for that group project you mentioned and you’ll come home bitching about it for the next two months.”

A miracle, that Armin doesn’t choke on a blueberry. “ _Shit_ \- bye, Eren!”

The front door closes to silence. Eren clears his plate, washes the dishes. Gold dapples through the windows and bathes the kitchen in warmth, and he sits on the counter with his coffee. “Morning, mom,” he greets, listens for the nothing he’s used to. Stupidity made habit, perhaps, but the best explanation for the occasional shudder over his neck. 

He likes to think she’d taken time to be dead. Carla had never liked being rushed; she’d be the sort to poke into every cranny of whatever afterlife the best people got. Made sure she grasped the entire thing before coming back to rest immortal eyes on her son - _just on me_ , he thinks, and feels old possessiveness bubble sourly up his throat. Grisha doesn’t deserve her haunting: never had, before or after she’d died.

Armin will fret if Eren ever tells him, let his blue eyes go huge and his voice soft and his words plead to be confided in. And Eren doesn’t want that yet, he knows as he shuffles inside to sleep a little more before his later shift. Just wants to remember the watchful presence over his skin last night as they’d eaten, filling him with warmth.

***

“I want to go home,” Hanji wails into her takeout and hears Petra giggle. They’ve long stopped trying to classify these group meals as either extremely late dinner or extremely early breakfast, savoring the company in the nighttime ghost town of SRF.

“Miss Hanji,” Moblit says slowly, consolingly, “I think it went better than you think it did. They aren’t going to sign off on a new two million dollar machine right away without understanding what it does - ”

“I TOLD THEM WHAT IT DOES!” 

Nanaba brandishes a fish ball between her chopsticks, sprawled in her chair with a lazy smirk. “You told them it had forty colors and was the coolest shit ever and then devolved into jargon no one understood.”

She pushes her sushi away and rubs at her temples. Really, giving presentations is supposed to be something one gets better at with time, but perhaps she had gotten a tad overexcited. It is likewise six in the morning, the hour at which she’s still burning the candle at both ends and others are running out of patience. 

“And it’s not the end of the world if we don’t get it,” Moblit continues. “We have a perfectly good cytometer already. Having to run two panels is a pain, yes, but this won’t slow down the project any.”

“I hate it when you’re right,” she mutters, peels her glasses off and rubs at her face. 

He pats her shoulder. “You pay me to be right.”

The meeting has shot even her legendary concentration, and their personal guard - when she and Moblit got important enough for a personal guard is beyond her - clearly want to go home. Hanji forces herself to call it with a tired smile despite the jittery desire to go back to work. “Let’s just close up for tonight then, yeah?”

Petra cheers. The rest of them devolve into laughter - save Mike, who spares a smirk - at how promptly ashamed she looks. 

The trio wait outside as she and Moblit decontaminate and clear down in clouds of 70% ethanol. The cage changes for breeding aren’t scheduled for another four days and the murine core minds their food, which means not having to come in this weekend. Not that that stops Hanji, usually: the _seeeeeeecrecy_ \- always dragged out sardonically in her brain - of night work doesn’t mean the day scientists don’t know she exists.

And there’s nothing else in her life, so. Just Sawney and Bean, and if she’s there after daybreak for them to harass then that’s good enough for the cats. Nifa, sometimes, but she hasn’t had time to swing by Trost General in weeks.

It’s Nanaba’s turn to ride an SRF bus with her: a work shuttle is less suspicious, after all, than climbing in and out of black cars. Hanji yawns, blinks at the sunrise bathing Sina in gold and then at her friend. They are the sole passengers. “Do they think I haven’t noticed she always volunteers to ride with him?”

“Moblit assumes you have other things on your mind and he’s usually right,” Nanaba says, amused. “And to be fair, Hanji, you don’t have a work-life balance which means he doesn’t get to, either.”

“That’s not true,” Hanji lies. “I trust him to be fully independent and to set whatever hours he likes. If he wanted to go full daytime I’d let him if the higher-ups would sign off.”

“One day he’s going to ask for time off to take Petra on a date and you’re going to faceplant him in acid - ”

“And I have a work-life balance,” she continues sullenly. “I have cats. I do self-care.” That is the term, right? 

Nanaba gives her a dry look. “You’re going to go straight to your home office to VPN and update your hypotheses, and then we’re all going to turn our phones off while you cc everyone on your rambly, sleepless emails as if any of our guard team knows what the hell you’re talking about.”

Indignant - Nanaba is exactly right and she does not like the revelation of her own predictability - Hanji looks out the window. “I’m going to have coffee right now,” is what escapes in a moment of word association to the small cafe open early on a corner. “And experience sunshine and talk to people and not think about science all weekend. The whole weekend. All of it. I’ll even go to the _gym_.”

“You do that, doctor,” is the angelic reply as Hanji shuffles off the bus. The driver looks deeply disapproving of the finger she gives Nanaba’s wave from across the street, and she wonders how she got so lucky to have friends like this as she pushes open the door.

***  
Levi joins Hanji’s table because he has no self-control.

Untrue. He’s procrastinating, because tonight’s report is going to be shitty and Kenny’s unhappiness is imminent suffering. At least Mikasa got the whole-ass bed to herself all night, he thinks sullenly as he suffers through the process of trying to sign _black tea_ to the confused barista. He can’t even drink it. He literally cannot drink it with his muzzle on, which brings all of this stupidity full circle.

The lights and keypad are at least under a panel, and paired with a thick coat stolen from some unfortunate intern at Sina Research it can perhaps pass for something normal someone would wear in winter. And the place is busy, which provides an excuse to share space. She’s got tea of her own, probably not hungry after the takeout he’d watched them all eat, and squints at him as he sits - not unkindly, though something unreadable shifts in her expression. It’s enough to make him lean into the shadow cast by the scratchy fake fur that lines the coat’s hood. 

For the first time, Levi has her attention and he suddenly finds himself in desperate need of the grounding weight his gear gives, concealed and cold against his hips. She takes her knit gloves off the same way she strips blue nitriles in the lab, grabs them by the edges to flip the yarn inside out. Rubs long pianist’s fingers together for warmth and then - 

_“Ah, I’m sorry! If I was paying attention sooner I’d have come over to help.”_

She’s _speaking_ to him. 

Their full-body cadence he uses with Mikasa is a derivative so much closer to telepathy than American Sign that he’s almost forgotten thousands know the base language. It’s fucking ridiculous to feel suddenly cored out, scraped like the last dregs of ice cream at the bottom of the pint.

_“It’s fine.”_

_“Did you get what you wanted?”_

No. The place has some nice blends, but trying to specify the deeply steeped option with citrus notes and substituted honey felt like too much effort. _“Yeah.”_ And then he has to know, because she’s neither deaf nor mute and most people learn for a reason. _“Who taught you?”_

 _“Learned for a friend,”_ emerges easily. _“I kept trying to build her better hearing aid prototypes than the ones on market until she told me to stop being stubborn and go take a class.”_

 _“You build stuff?”_ News to him. He’s only ever seen her do wetwork. 

She brightens impossibly further, blocks the sun right out. _“I build everything,”_ is the cheeky, prideful reply. _“I’m Hanji, by the way. Nice to meet you. What’s your name?”_

 _Make something up. “Levi,”_ he tells her instead, and feels his doom crawling up his back.

***  
Mikasa has nothing to report to Kenny, but she knows Levi appreciates the solidarity in going together anyway. Their uncle’s office is only clean because no one else but them are trusted to clean it, and she watches her cousin’s eyes follow the ash from Kenny’s smoke collecting on the floor. 

He speedreads Levi’s report, sets it alight and lets it smolder in the old trash can, casting soot over the metal. “You’re fucking late,” he begins, kicking his feet onto the desk. “Do you know what time Uri wakes up, kid? Six. I don’t like telling him shit’s not ready when he asks for it.”

The stiffness of Levi’s shoulders tells her Kenny hadn’t actually given a deadline. He liked to do that, hold them to standards never set. “And this is _shit_. They had a meeting about a fancy machine, what the fuck does that tell me? What’s her timeline on the vector? When are you finding that out?”

Levi’s hands don’t move to answer. Kenny’s eyes narrow. “Upstairs,” is the cold command, and as they ascend the frigid staircase his hands fist in their hair. It is upside down: their room is closest in the house to hell, the pit - as he calls it - on the highest floor. “Wanna fly?” he’d asked her once, dangling her thin body from the window.

There has always been a reason Levi takes to maneuver gear better than she does.

Her uncle pushes - lightly, for him, but Mikasa knows better than to catch herself and lets her knees hit the tile. The moon spills coldly over it, his boots crossing her vision - the closet door creaks, Levi’s fingers finding hers. This is his punishment, but by design they are the same. Made to love each other, too much for either’s good.

So neither is surprised when Kenny backhands Mikasa.

He is not an anatomist: does brute force, only, but well. And he talks as he hauls her up by the throat and pummels her; springtime settles over her skin, purple blossoms that weep. “This is you, kid,” he says conversationally to his nephew, buries his rings in her belly. Every flex of his fingers anticipates a snapped neck. “You’re killing her. Killing your sister. That what you want? Wanna live with that shit?” She hears a dry heave and a swallow - he knows better than to throw up in the mask - and sees the same image he does, Kuchel’s swollen toes. 

She’ll live. Kenny will have someone fix her, because she’s still useful. But not until he’s ready: not until Levi raises cold fingers to beg forgiveness, and not until he’s locked up there for the night, and not until the dull thump of each stair against her back puts Mikasa to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some more foundation in chapter 2 before the plot speeds up! The next chapter's going to take at least a couple weeks as my life is about to get very hectic, but by mid-February we should be back in business.


End file.
